SAN JOSE — A man has been charged with murdering his wife in a chilling episode where he allegedly beat and choked her to death, then kept watch over her body for half a day before calling for help and making a hopeless attempt at reviving her, authorities said.

All of this reportedly occurred while the couple’s 5-year-old daughter was in the same house, followed by the suspect giving police a disjointed and defiant explanation of what happened.

Sajawal Chadhar, 27, was arraigned Monday in the killing of 40-year-old Leann Watson-Chadhar, whose body was discovered Thursday inside their Coyne Court home in East San Jose. Investigators have since stated they believe she was killed sometime the previous night.

Court records in Santa Clara County show no criminal history for Chadhar, nor do they show any documented history of domestic violence involving the couple prior to Thursday’s events. Police also confirmed that the couple was living together and that there were no protective orders issued against Chadhar.

Sajawal Chadhar has been arrested by San Jose police in connection with the death of his wife, Leann Watson Chadhar. (Courtesy of the San Jose Police Department)

According to San Jose police, officers were called to the home about 8:47 a.m. Thursday after getting a 911 call from Chadhar’s mother, who reported her son told her that his wife was unconscious and that he was trying to perform CPR. Chadhar would later tell detectives that he called up an instructional video on his smartphone.

The arriving officers found Watson-Chadhar’s body in a bathroom in the home, with visible injuries to her face and neck. She was pronounced dead soon after by responding paramedics from the San Jose Fire Department.

As Chadhar and his young daughter stood by, police discovered a horrific scene in a rear bedroom, marked by blood spattered and smeared in various locations, overturned furniture and other objects scattered on the floor, in what they quickly deduced were the remnants of a violent physical struggle.

Detectives wrote in a statement submitted to prosecutors that Chadhar was “extremely uncooperative” with police and was evasive in recounting how his wife died.

The detectives said Chadhar told officers that his wife “began choking and lost consciousness, so he carried her into the bathroom and splashed water on her. However, he refused to specify where she was in the house when she was choking and lost consciousness.”

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The explanation grew more strained when a couple of hours into the investigation, an investigator from the Santa Clara County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office examined the victim’s body and found signs of strangulation, and estimated that she had been dead for anywhere from 10 to 16 hours. Chadhar was arrested later that day.

An autopsy performed Friday confirmed the strangulation marks but gave an unseen cause for her death: blunt-force trauma to the chest that caused severe internal injuries.

The death marked San Jose’s fifth homicide of the year, which is the same number recorded at the same point in 2016, a year that saw a 25-year high of 47 homicides. The last of those was also a domestic violence killing, in which a man fatally stabbed his wife, and four homicides last year were attributed to domestic violence.

Robert Salonga is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter covering criminal justice and public safety for The Mercury News. A San Jose native, he attended UCLA and has a Master's degree in journalism from the University of Maryland. He previously reported in Washington, D.C., Salinas and the East Bay, and is a middling triathlete. Reach him the low-tech way at 408-920-5002.

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